Brittany Holljes

I was born in Nashville, TN but most of my childhood was spent just outside Atlanta, GA and San Francisco, CA. When I graduated from UC Berkeley at 19, I moved to Durham, NC to start a band with my two brothers. Eventually we signed with a Nashville label and my journey brought me back to where I’d started with a great story to tell.

My love for learning and desire to share in curiosity, wonder, and play is rooted in having a mother who worked in education and a father who is a toy inventor. When I was in college, I started teaching dance to preschoolers. Before graduation I also pursued a certification in Permaculture Design which was a fully outdoor educational experience that changed my life.

In my twenties, my band held workshops for students as we toured the country. But it was when we needed a very specific looking goat for a music video that I first discovered A New Leaf and visited Pip & Pickles Farm. My brief experience on the grounds stayed with me for years and after leaving a life on the road and starting a family, I thought a lot about the sunny classroom I’d seen with the happy goats just outside. It was the kind of school experience I wanted for my daughter. It felt like the sort of community to which I could contribute my skills, passion and creativity and be embraced. I was right and I am very thankful to be a part of A New Leaf.

I am the Director of Outreach Education for our Forest Campus at Overall Creek Arboretum. I am expanding and starting new programs at the Forest Campus like Homeschool Enrichment and Forest Preschool Playgroup, as well as facilitating external relationships with other schools and homeschool coops.

I am reaching out to new families who are interested in nature-based education, building a team who will help us develop the Arboretum, and getting to know our amazing students and their families, who will be primary contributors as we grow our trails, community garden, and food forest on 32 beautiful acres.

Steve Irwin was always my hero growing up. My brothers have been my built-in mentors and lifelong best friends.

I LOVE to change, I am so thankful for the arc of my life. One of my favorite changes has been moving away from a confidence that relied on carrying everything all by myself. As I have gotten older, and through much hard headedness, that type of isolated confidence became too brittle to last. I started to reach for deeper sources and found that interconnectedness is a much more sustainable path to true confidence. It is about cultivating a community that shares the load and cheers me on, and for whom I can do the same.

I spend time with my baby and husband! I sing. I watercolor. I write musicals. I thrift. I bake. I chaos garden. I call my many beloved friends.

Music, birthwork, permaculture, visual art, theater, dance.

I just bought 16 jars of Sweet Hot Pickles from a specific place in Ohio because I love them so much! And I would never turn down a Sungold tomato.

YELLOW! Butter, joy, sunflowers, warmth, baby chicks, goldfinches, lemons, summer… did I mention butter? 

I’d like to keep bees. I caught a swarm in a bourbon barrel in my backyard this spring and they are thriving, but quickly outgrowing it. I’d like to get them safely out of the barrel and start to care for them in bee boxes this fall.

The families we serve in this community are really what drives me. I am grateful for the trust placed in us by families and the sense that we are delivering something impactful, unique, and nourishing to the children of Nashville and beyond. We also have so many new projects and programs to launch, I am fired up all the time! I love that our team is supportive of one another, it makes it easy to start work every day. I also love the big picture vision of community spaces that Elle is bringing into reality. It feeds my creative soul to know we are building large scale projects that will reach so many, like the Overall Creek Arboretum.